


Squeeze Your Fists Til Nothing's Left

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency! (TV 1972)
Genre: EMS Life, Gen, prompts, this is a pairing if you want it to be, written for friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:47:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23403976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: Craig thinking, like he does.  Craig thinking too much, maybe, like he does.For the prompt "Sharing a Drink Together"
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13





	Squeeze Your Fists Til Nothing's Left

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xcourtney_chaoticx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xcourtney_chaoticx/gifts).



Dry, dry, the cracked yellow earth in the hills cries out for water, sends desperate roots down empty hillsides, down to the cracked yellow basin of the city where the sirens howl and dogs sleep on chains on patios.

When did it rain last? He's forgotten. He's forgotten and he should have marked the days. The squad pops and hisses when they park it like a mad thing, like a hungry thing, like a tired thing sighing back into its place. House dog, patio dog. 

He lost a button somewhere. He's sewing it back on. 

"Craig," his partner says, from the gauzy sleep of the overnight, through the veil between the dream and the waking dark. "Craig, it's two in the morning."

"Two-fifteen."

"Craig, just wear another shirt."

Just a few more passes. The bunkroom is heavy with the bodies of men, like their dreams are leaking out, sliding up to the ceiling, sweating down on them. Cap's set up a fan. It's mostly noise, noise and scattered snores, noise and the press of seven men breathing in and breathing out.

He bites the thread in two. Bob would be proud, maybe. Bob would nod agreeably. Teach the bastard who's boss, he might say. Scissors are so refined. He has some in his kit but it's dark anyhow. Safety, he would say. He would bite the thread in the dark. Maybe he has some animal in him after all, that's funny.

DeSoto was wrong: he did feel. For Gage. About the accident - how could he not? There's hardly a handful of them, paramedics. Hearing it over the radio and through the grapevine - Gage was in an accident, a dumbass drunk, hit him with a car, did you hear, he's in surgery, did you hear? Heard it like static on the radio, heard it like overnight chatter til it just when in one ear and out the other and what else was left? Anger. Just that dull, useless anger that smacks you in the teeth and runs away laughing til you squeeze your fists and squeeze and squeeze but nothing's there. DeSoto was wrong, he does feel, he just doesn't have time for it, not all the time anyway. Who's got the time? 

DeSoto had done everything right: treated Gage, transported him, handed him off to the doctors and nurses. What else was there to do?

(squeeze your fists and squeeze and squeeze, until nothing's left and nothing was there at all, but it drives you mad anyhow.)

But Gage got well and Craig got reassigned and he thinks it was probably a big joke to them, send him to the one medic who's never eaten something he didn't get on his shirt, doesn't shine his shoes, doesn't check the squad but once. Nicknames Dr. Early "Pops" and bows to Nurse Dixie when she hands out their supplies, a parody of chivalry.

(it all drives you mad anyhow)

Just a big damn joke but the joke's on them, isn't it, or maybe it's on him, the joke's inside him when he's halfway out the squad before Bob's parked it and thinking: whatever I don't grab, Bob's got it.

The joke's on him thinking: Bob. The shape in the bed in the dark like a low hillside. He takes his glasses off and looks at Bob and tries to see what he's missing, so he puts his glasses back on and nothing's there again, except the pounding his chest like the brush in the mountains clawing at the earth and crying out for water.

The shirt in his hands is stiff at the collar and soft in the body, smoke and sweat even through his undershirt. He'll wash it when he gets home, he'll starch it and hang it up to dry. Bob, he thinks, would toss his stuff in the forty-pounder at the laundromat and throw in the 5 cent box of bubbles and let it go, but his shirt is just as blue, and soft in the body where the silver badge hands. Their patches just alike. 

A month ago he'd have thought: how, on earth, did Bob Bellingham make it through the program?

An hour ago he'd have thought: how, on earth, did I do without?

(but they had just come to the hospital, then. just left the patient in the hands of the good doctors. and he was vulnerable, then, as he always was, but there wasn't time.)

He peers at the radium glow of his wristwatch. Two-twenty-five. He slides out of bed so not to stir the semblance of slumber in the room, into his turnouts, and goes to the kitchen. 

Cool water, harsh water from the tap. Once, when he was a boy, he hiked in the Berkshires with his scout troop and knelt beside a rock wall and drank with his hands from a spring and the water there was cold and sweet and mossy and he thought if it as being as old and as wild as the earth, as intransigent as the mud on his knees.

Bob has knelt beside him in a raucous scene, and their eyes hit like a glance of sparks and Bob said, to the man in the grass, buddy we're gonna take care of you, and Craig had his hands in the IV kit already, Craig's mind leaping ahead to the drugs, to what Bob would be asking for. 

Cool water, mossy water, the water coming from the stone and soaking the earth again.

"Kid," says Bob's awakening voice. "Kid, what're you doing?"

Craig feels a shyness he thinks is only possible at almost-three in the morning, in the kitchen with a man he thinks of by first name, a man he thinks of as partner. 

"Getting a drink," he says, shortly, simply. Bob's eyes are piercing in the dark. "You want one, Bob?"

The fists open and what wasn't there comes grateful to the softened fingers.

"Yeah, kid. Sure."


End file.
